The unmerited fear of genetically modified organism crops threatens scientific advancements in biotechnology needed to meet the growing global demand for safe and affordable food.
In most instances, biotechnology, though a radically different approach, is a sustaining technology: It's a dramatically improved way of targeting problems that we hadn't been able to solve with the conventional approach of mainstream pharmaceutical companies.
Not only are we reading life code, we're beginning to copy it through cloning, and we're beginning to write, and in the measure that we do that, boy, you can build a lot of very powerful companies in a short period of time.
Biotech research is incredibly important for health-care innovation.
We're at the beginning of the digitization and automation of biotech.
The real frontier is making these hybrid systems where you expand the capabilities of biology with chemistry.
The genomics revolution, proteomics, metabolomics, all of these 'omics' that sound so terrific on grants and on business plans. What we're doing is we are seizing control of our evolutionary future. I mean we're essentially using technology to just jam evolution into fast-forward.
Simple genome engineering of bacteria and yeast is just the beginning of the rise of the true biohackers. This is a community of several thousand people, with skill sets ranging from self-taught software hackers to biology postdocs who are impatient with the structure of traditional institutional lab work.
I'm interested in using evolution to move forward into the future, to get biology to do a lot of new chemistry for us.
IndieBio's capital, facilities, and deep mentoring by a network of biotech-specific experts have the potential to spawn the Google, Facebook, and Instagrams of biology.
A lot of people said this was impossible. 'You can't build biotech for $50,000. You can't build anything for $50,000.' Well, that's no longer true, and we're proving it.
Biohackers want to tinker; do fun science; and, in the process, accelerate the pace of biotech innovation.
I like to think of synthetic biology as liquid alchemy, only instead of transmuting precious metals, you're synthesizing new biological functionality inside very small channels. It's called microfluidics.
We are seeing a new wave of young biologists that are attacking old problems with new tools and fresh ideas, leading to new types of bio startups and creating a much-needed engine to drive Silicon Valley into the next century.
I see a bright future for the biotechnology industry when it follows the path of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized.
IndieBio's capital, facilities and deep mentoring by a network of biotech specific experts have the potential to spawn the Google's, Facebook's and Instagram's of biology.
By being able to write a genome and plug it into an organism, the software, if you will, changes the hardware.
